Dr. Andrew Wood Office: HGH 210; phone: (408) 924-5378 Email: wooda@email.sjsu.edu Web: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda

Chapter Six: Consumer Culture and the Manufacturing of Desire

Reading:

Sturken, M, & Cartwright, L. (2001). Practices of looking: An introduction to visual culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

In Chapter Six (pp. 189-236), the authors explore the emergence of the modern consumer society - a site wherein self is constructed through acts of consumption rather than through relationships with family bonds and kinship ties. This society arises in the age of increasing concentration of strangers in urban areas unified only by mass mediated advertisements. These ads sell products whose planned obsolescence affirms the need to train consumers to purchase more products from the inevitable surplus generated in a capitalist system. Thus advertising invokes the ideology that consumption is essential for happy citizens. The phenomenology of consumption becomes increasingly based on spectacle and mobility, most illustrated by the nineteenth century flaneur and the contemporary shopping mall stroll. Given the seemingly perpetual movement of individuals and shift of scenes in which individuals find themselves, the visual image must be reformatted to accommodate continual change and an ever fickle eye. Moreover, the authors note the rise of Late Modern or Postindustrial Capitalism defined by the global exchange of objects and, increasingly, nonmaterial items of consumption. Thus, brands, fashions, and images become less connected to material resources even as their production, distribution, and consumption continue to possess material impacts.

As commodities become cheaper to produce and increasingly interchangeable, their creators and distributors must develop ways to increase their exchange value - typically the monetary "value" of a product - even as the use value - the relative utility it provides persons and society - remains the same, or does not exist. Drawing from the Frankfort School, the authors describe the Marxist critique of the resulting commodity fetishism, in which the actual means of production and purpose which shapes an object is ignored, replaced by an artificial set of meanings and values that affirm the ideology of consumption. In contrast, the authors note Pop Art appropriation of throw-away consumer objects for artistic purposes. Artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein celebrated (even while gently mocking) the very objects that Marxist critics deplore, filling them with their own meanings. The question remains whether their aesthetic play did not make them dupes of the "owners of production" in merely another way. After all, how much free advertising does Campbell's Soup Company get for Warhol's Two Hundred Campbell's?

Briefly, the authors remind us of the role of intepellation in advertisements as text and images seek to "hail" us assume that the ad speaks to us. From that relationship, individuals might imagine themselves into the idealized vision created by the advertisement, visualizing themselves "completed" by consumption of the product. Intriguingly, mass produced objects often become sold as means to distinguish ourselves from others, even as ads seek to distinguish interchangeable consumables from each other. Even so, this idealized vision often demands comparison between ourselves and what we lack. Drawing from the psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan, the authors describe this lacking as a state born from our desire to return to an infantile state of completeness with our mothers. Borrowing from the writings of Michel Foucault, the authors remind us of our willingness to become docile bodies, shaping and contouring ourselves to conform to the mediated images we see. From this perspective, however, our docility affirms institutional strategies of surveillance and control, not psychological needs of affirmation and return. We must recall that advertisements also invite us to imagine ourselves as "other" than the norm, often by employing "marked" signs such as "exotic" locales and ethnicities. The irony, of course, is that consumers seek these "alternative" or "hip" products to appear different while buying into the same ideological assumption: the good life must be purchased.

After noting ways in which individuals may use products or their advertisements of counter-hegemonic purposes through bricolage - and the ways in which corporations turn those acts of bricolage into new products to purchase - the authors explore the transformation of logos into free-floating signifiers whose meanings do not necessarily point to products at all. Consider how many logos you wear, use to beautify your personal spaces, and employ to define your personality. At some point, does the sign system of logos point to a disparate pile of products, or to a product you are advertising: yourself? Concluding this chapter, the authors note various forms of resistance in which advertisements become "jammed" or "hacked" to shock viewers into new and potentially revolutionary perspectives on our media saturated culture, and upon the products we consume.

Activity

Select a magazine advertisement and describe the ways it seeks to co-opt critique to sell a product.